A variety of games, toys and puzzles are known in the prior art which teach and entertain through the use of speech and sounds. Some toys pose problems concerning math, spelling, sentence structure and other topics. An existing toy, "The story book" made available by Mattel Toys, Inc. allows a player to create funny stories using a menu of sentence fragments.
The following United States Patents disclose systems believed representative of the prior art: U.S. Pat. No. 3,276,144, issued Oct. 4, 1966, U.S. Pat. No. 3,908,288, issued Sep. 30, 1975, U.S. Pat. No. 4,326,710, issued Apr. 27, 1982, U.S. Pat. No. 4,618,985, issued Oct. 21, 1986, U.S. Pat. No. 4,648,086, issued Mar. 3, 1987, U.S. Pat. No. 4,936,185, issued Jun. 26, 1990, U.S. Pat. No. 5,010,495, issued Apr. 23, 1991, U.S. Pat. No. 5,038,658, issued Aug. 13, 1991, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,145,447, issued September 8, 1992.
What these prior art toys and other devices all have in common is their limited flexibility concerning the topics they cover, how much of a topic can be covered, how many languages and dialects are used to communicate what is covered, and how these topics can be used in an entertaining or instructional game or puzzle format.